Co-Innovation Lab's Contribution to Sustainability

Sustainability is a relatively new business theme that has surfaced strongly in times of the current economic crisis. It reflects our vision on the finiteness of resources and sensitivity to environmental changes such as the no longer deniable climate change. As such resource and environmental elements have always been part of individual business concepts, the closed system of our globalized world forces us to think and act globally. Political decisions set legal frameworks for sustainability.

In November 2008, SAP released its 2007/2008 Sustainability report and details its activities in support of its ongoing strategic commitment to deliver superior sustainability solutions to customers and improve its own sustainability performance. Therefore, the SAP Global Co-Innovation Lab Network has defined sustainability as one of the focus elements of its project portfolio. The COIL Network is thus proud to be an active participant in this area and especially to be an active member of SAP's Global R&D organization mentioned within the report - highlighting the two COIL locations Palo Alto and Tokyo.

Besides this project focus elaborated below, COIL applies aspects of sustainability in its own data centers by applying Green IT and Virtualization technologies wherever applicable. Two main sustainability areas are currently represented by projects in the SAP Global Co-Innovation Lab Network:

The lab stress tests simulated the load of 600 sales and distribution users - detecting a

total energy reduction of over 50%. This corresponds - expressed in CO2 equivalents - to the amount of 84 Japanese cedars that could be saved from being ceased. In essence, these compelling results thus testify that significant energy consumption for business IT systems can be achieved by employing latest chip technology.

NEC Corporation and F5 Networks Japan K.K. conducted joint verification concerning optimization of an SAP ERP system. System evaluation took place through the construction of SAP ERP application servers in NEC's Express 5800/ECO CENTER, and load distribution of SAP system users' access that was implemented with F5's BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager ("BIG-IP LTM").

The load for each application server was monitored by NEC's consolidated operation

and management software WebSAM and server resources were allocated accordingly.

Furthermore, the BIG-IP LTM was notified of configuration changes, and system load was equalized in accordance with each change, thereby enabling optimal system configuration for the execution of business processes:

Achievement of a power-saving platform for the SAP system

u00A0Simplified operation and elimination of operation mistakes by making configuration changes autonomous.

Upgrades to SAP's latest software release show strong momentum worldwide in enterprises large and small.

The reason?

ERP 6.0 delivers on promise on SAP's new service-oriented architecture paradigm since it offers service bundles to compose novel business applications. In order to minimize the costs of ERP upgrades is a steady challenge to many IT departments. With the advent of

virtualization, compelling new procedures for ERP upgrading can easily be applied.

The impact?

No matter whether or not the final production system itself will be operated in a virtualized environment, the concept of virtualization represented by state-of-the-art solutions such as VMware's ESX server, provide the means to cut down upgrade hardware costs for intermediate upgrade steps. Even more important, with successive snapshots at decisive upgrade steps, it is easy to step back to any snapshot that had been taken. This new capability enables the validation of support package implementation and verification of additional procedures before the final "real" upgrade actually takes place. Overall, these new capabilities represent important progress compared to the traditional upgrade procedure, in terms of flexibility and risk mitigation, resulting in lower cost.

SAP's Co-Innovation Lab Tokyo teamed up with VMware Japan to evaluate these new capabilities. In the lab's data center, the joint SAP/VMware team upgraded an R/3 Enterprise (Extension 2000) system with a MS SQL 2000 database on 32bit to an ERP 6.0 SR 2 release with a MS SQL 2005 database on 64bit. Both the database upgrade and the ERP upgrade were performed using VMware ESX server. A joint whitepaper "Use of Virtualization Technology with SAP" ( Japanese version) has been published on SDN and provides further insights into the new way of lean upgrading.

State-of-the-art disaster recovery for SAP ERP or any other potential SAP solution has been prototyped in the Co-Innovation Lab, combining latest-technology products from Cisco, Intel, Netapp, VMware and the technical expertise from Zacchi consulting.

The verification was conducted between Tokyo and Osaka, in a manner close to the customer's hands-on environment, where the operation site was placed in Tokyo (COIL Tokyo Data Center) and the recovery site in Osaka (SAP Japan's Western Japan Branch

Office). The SAP sales management transactions were conducted consistently and differential data were transferred to the recovery site every hour through a regular internet connection. This verified the capability of the solution to be used in a common internet environment in remote locations.

The prototype utilizes SRM (Site Recovery Manager) by VMware, Snap Mirror by NetApp, Nehalem by Intel, Cisco Network Solution. Making use of virtualization in Disaster Recovery Solution allows customers to be released from the need of installing a system at the recovery site similar to the real environment, and enables them to expand the use of the recovery site in non-disaster situations. Green IT will also be promoted along with cost reduction, by introducing the latest server with improved performance and increased power-saving capability to the recovery site.

Given the complexity of today's IT environments and the business risks of downtime, data loss, and failure, no one can afford to operate without a robust and well-tested disaster recovery (DR) plan for critical systems. However, maintaining an idle data center is not an economically viable option. Further, testing of the DR plan can be costly, complex, and disruptive. Now, VMware and NetApp have teamed up with SAP to take the risk, worry, and complexity out of DR for your SAP software landscape by providing a solution that makes

disaster recovery manageable, reliable, repeatable, and cost effective. The results of the projects have been published asSolution Briefand can be viewed within an overview screencam.

Co-Innovation Lab Partners: Netapp and VMware

Sustainable Business Process Optimization

Lean Tank Farm Management Processes Using Sap Mii

Asian Paints Ltd., a longtime SAP customer, has been actively engaged with the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, which has helped it to address several key business challenges. One business scenario linked Asian Paint's existing shop floor control systems with SAP ERP to enable better reporting and effective decision-making. Asian Paints worked with SAP and KLG Systel to connect its batch control system with the production planning and plant information functionality in the SAP landscape using the